Immigration Blog

Washington is hotly debating whether President Trump's wall-building falls within the powers that Congress has delegated to him. But the bureaucracy has been eroding the president's executive power with much less fanfare. Deference to the "experts" in the "non-partisan" civil service has weakened the principle that government officials who are not accountable to the voters require oversight by those who are. Bureaucrats are now thought to deserve their own independent power base, and the president’s rejection of their expertise can be ruled illegal.

The Trump administration has been lauding the seizure of virtually all of the previously held territory of the ISIS "caliphate" — the remnants of which are now holed up in a single town in Syria, fighting a fierce street-by-street battle to the death. The administration cites it as evidence of the functional demise of ISIS as an entity, although some experts have disputed this, pointing to a diaspora of thousands of fighters who have dispersed, choosing instead to flee and fight another day.

If the news is depressing (i.e., causing one to be blue), as it is, then the old wedding refrain could easily be applied to this week's EB-5 headlines. That's the immigrant investor program that sells a family-sized batch of green cards to those aliens investing $500,000 in a government-approved, but not guaranteed, investment.

The problem, as USCIS does not explain, is that some immigrant families in the States force young, U.S.-born minors (usually female) to marry older aliens from, for example, the family's village overseas, giving that alien a green card and denying the young woman the right to fall in love and marry someone of her own choosing.

The biggest issue in immigration isn't welfare or illegal immigration per se; it's the total number of immigrants settling in the U.S., legally or illegally.

At about the same time President Donald Trump signed into law the abysmal consolidated appropriations act to fund DHS, DOJ, and a few other federal entities for the remainder of this federal fiscal year, he announced that he would be declaring a national emergency to fund a physical barrier on our southern border.

The caravan of some 2,000 mostly Hondurans began arriving earlier this month, but was unable to rush the U.S. border because the Mexican government detained them in a converted ceramics factory. But as they're bused to other locations in Mexico, most still intend to cross the border and exploit the catch-and-release loopholes in U.S. law.

We find that our list of 54 compromised colleges has shrunk by 16 (or at the rate of about one a month), with eight institutions going out of business, and eight others (none of which appeared in 2017 to have been major visa mills) dropping their instruction of foreign students, leaving 38.

Section 224 of the funding bill makes the U.S. government a co-conspirator in the criminal scheme between the smuggler and the parent/guardian paying to have an "unaccompanied" minor brought illegally to the U.S.

We keep hearing about America's southern border, the one with Mexico, and sometimes — by way of contrast — our northern border, the one with Canada.